The Revolution Stops at the RFP: Why organizations committed to equity must rethink how they engage consultants

By Paul Taylor, Former nonprofit leader, Co-Founder of Evenings & Weekends Consulting & Instructor at Simon Fraser University

Across the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, many organizations have made meaningful progress in advancing decent work practices.

We’ve seen organizations commit to paid interviews, salary transparency, living wages, flexible work environments, and more equitable hiring processes. We’ve seen deeper conversations about burnout, workplace harm, accessibility, and inclusion. These shifts matter. They reflect years of advocacy from workers, organizers, equity practitioners, and communities pushing institutions to do better.

But there is one place where many of these commitments seem to disappear entirely: the consultant procurement process.

As more consultants from equity-deserving communities move into independent consulting work, many of us are encountering systems and practices that still reflect some of the most entrenched norms of corporate consulting culture: transactional over relational engagement, opacity over transparency, scarcity-driven competition, and procurement practices shaped by white supremacy and “bro culture” values that don’t reward lived experience and community-rooted expertise.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Organizations that would never ask a job applicant to complete unpaid labour, tolerate opaque compensation practices, or prepare extensively for an interview with less than 24 hours’ notice often do exactly that to consultants.

If we are serious about equity, decent work, and transforming organizational culture, then we also need to examine how inequity shows up in Requests for Proposals (RFPs), procurement processes, and consultant engagement practices.

I was inspired in part by Michelle Gazze’s thoughtful article in The Philanthropist Journal, which explored the inequities embedded within strategic planning processes and the lack of infrastructure and resourcing available to many organizations trying to do this work well.

The article rightly points to a larger systemic issue: many organizations are expected to undertake transformational planning work without adequate funding, staffing capacity, or operational support. Funders also have a role to play here. Too often, planning, facilitation, engagement, and organizational development work are treated as optional overhead rather than essential infrastructure for healthy organizations and movements.

At the same time, there are important examples of leadership worth recognizing. The Black Opportunity Fund has demonstrated what it can look like to meaningfully invest in community infrastructure, organizational development, and long-term capacity building in ways that move beyond performative commitments to equity.

We need more of that.

And we also need to keep moving the dial on equity by acknowledging and challenging all of the ways that inequities continue to show up, including in the ways organizations engage consultants.

Here are a few things organizations should consider.

1. Stop Pitting Consultants Against Each Other to Drive Down Pricing

Too often, organizations treat consultants like vendors in a race to the bottom.

Equity-centred consulting work is relational, emotionally intensive, community-informed, and frequently built on years of lived experience and trust-building. It cannot always be measured against the cheapest proposal.

Organizations should also reconsider the common practice of requesting quotes simply to satisfy a “three quote minimum” procurement threshold when they already know who they intend to work with. This practice consumes unpaid labour and time from consultants who never had a genuine opportunity to secure the work.

If procurement policies require multiple quotes, organizations should be transparent about that reality and explore more ethical ways to meet those requirements.

2. Share the Budget Up Front

This should be as standard as pay transparency is in hiring.

When organizations withhold budget information, consultants are left guessing what level of engagement is realistic or expected. That ambiguity often disadvantages smaller firms, equity-deserving consultants, and newer practitioners who may not have insider knowledge of institutional pricing norms.

Sharing the budget helps consultants propose approaches that are aligned with your resources and priorities. It creates clarity, reduces unnecessary labour, and supports more equitable participation.

3. Consider More Relational and Accessible Proposal Processes

Not every project requires a 25-page proposal.

Organizations should consider lighter-touch, more relational approaches to engaging consultants. In many cases, asking proponents to respond to 3 to 4 focused questions, provide a draft budget, and submit a cover letter may provide more than enough information to assess initial fit.

Lengthy proposals often privilege consulting firms with larger administrative infrastructure, proposal-writing capacity, or unpaid time to dedicate toward speculative work.

Relational work should not require corporate theatre.

4. Share Interview Questions in Advance

If organizations believe in accessibility, trauma-informed practice, and equitable hiring, those principles should extend to consultants as well.

Providing interview questions in advance creates more equitable conditions for thoughtful participation. It supports neurodivergent consultants, people working across multiple contracts, caregivers, and those for whom English or institutional language may not be their first language or communication style.

Strong facilitation and consulting work is rarely about who can improvise the fastest in a high-pressure environment.

5. Stop Scheduling Interviews with Less Than a Day’s Notice

This happens far more often than it should.

Consultants are balancing multiple projects, caregiving responsibilities, travel, facilitation prep, and often precarious income realities. Last-minute interview requests create unnecessary stress and can unintentionally filter out people who do not have the privilege of immediate availability.

Equity includes respecting people’s time.

6. Pay Consultants for Interviews and Additional Preparation

If a consultant is being invited into a multi-stage process, developing draft approaches, participating in strategy conversations, or completing significant prep work, organizations should strongly consider compensation.

Many consultants, particularly independent consultants from equity-deserving communities, are already carrying substantial unpaid labour through community work, mentorship, advocacy, and relationship-building.

We cannot continue to normalize unpaid intellectual and emotional labour simply because someone is not a salaried employee.

7. Build Feedback into Your Evaluation Process

One of the most respectful things an organization can do is provide meaningful feedback to unsuccessful proponents.

Recently, the Community Sector Network of PEI shared not only the outcome of a proposal process with us (we were unsuccessful), but also the score we received and thoughtful context about why decisions were made. That level of transparency and care stood out immediately.

It demonstrated respect for the time, energy, and thought that went into the proposal.

Organizations should commit to providing some form of feedback, especially for consultants invited to interview or asked to complete additional preparation work.

Importantly, feedback processes should be designed in advance as part of the evaluation framework itself. Otherwise, it often becomes unpaid emotional and administrative labour downloaded onto one staff member after decisions are already made.

8. Budget for Community Expertise

Too often, organizations expect consultants to “bring community voices into the room” without allocating resources to compensate those community members for their expertise and participation.

If your project will require engagement with people who hold lived experience, grassroots knowledge, cultural expertise, or sector insight, there should be budget allocated to compensate them appropriately.

Consultants should not be expected to absorb those costs or facilitate extractive engagement processes on behalf of organizations.

9. Recognize That Procurement Is Culture

RFPs are not neutral administrative tools.

They reflect organizational values, assumptions about expertise, comfort with power-sharing, and ideas about whose labour is worthy of respect.

When organizations create inaccessible, opaque, overly burdensome, or extractive procurement processes, they are communicating something about who belongs, who is trusted, and whose time matters.

And when organizations build transparent, relational, respectful processes, they create the conditions for stronger collaborations, better work, and more equitable outcomes.

The nonprofit and philanthropic sectors have spent years talking about systems change.

But systems change is not only about mission statements, strategic plans, or public commitments. It also lives inside budgets, timelines, procurement policies, interview processes, and the countless operational decisions that shape how people experience institutions every day.

Equity work does not stop at hiring practices.

It must also extend to how organizations engage the people they invite in to help imagine, facilitate, and build a more just future.